EUTHANASIA is currently illegal in the UK despite claims that health professionals often help terminally-ill patients to die.

EUTHANASIA is currently illegal in the UK despite claims that health professionals often help terminally-ill patients to die.

But elsewhere around the world governments and politicians have voted for legalisation.

The Netherlands became the first country in the world to formally sanction euthanasia last year. In practice Dutch doctors had been helping patients to die for decades but risked prosecution before the law was changed.

Euthanasia can be administered in Holland only to patients who are in a state of continuous, unbearable and incurable suffering. A second opinion is required and the patient must be judged to be of sound mind, and the patient's request to die must be made voluntarily, independently and persistently.

Belgium legalised euthanasia a month after Holland in May 2002, also with strict conditions governing assisted suicide.

But unlike Dutch legislation minors cannot seek assistance to die.

Euthanasia is illegal in Switzerland but assisted suicide is condoned by the authorities and can be carried out by non-physicians.

The law does not state that a person must be terminally ill and it considers assisting suicide a crime only if the motive is selfish.

By the end of last year physicians in the US state of Oregon had helped more than 120 people to die in the five years since physician-assisted suicide had been made legal.

Australia's remote Northern Territory became the first part of the country to legalise voluntary euthanasia in 1996 but the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act was overturned eight months later. Four patients died under the terms of the Act.